PARIS — For almost 10 years, the French political establishment has portrayed defeating Marine Le Pen as a duty. Every cycle, they roll out the same rhetoric and warnings about the nationalist right and Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National), and French voters have held their noses and voted for the guardians of a fading European political system.

At next year’s presidential election, there may no longer be a single member of France’s political establishment left to face Le Pen. One of the more likely candidates to challenge her is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a 75-year-old radical left-winger who leads France Unbowed (La France Insoumise). Opposed to traditional French culture and anything else that people recognize as culturally or socially European, Mélenchon is the real French radical, who wishes to even rename the French language.

If Mélenchon runs, French voters are projected to hand Le Pen the presidency by a landslide.

The National Rally has committed itself to the broad themes of French sovereignty, economic independence, and national security, with an emphasis of controlling immigration and protecting France’s cultural identity. Like many other modern European nationalist parties, its economic program is far more to the left of their counterparts in the Anglosphere, with pro-welfare policies and support for “economic fairness.” Regarding the European Union, the Rally wants more power devolved to the bloc’s member states.

Those in France who have preached moderation will have nobody to blame but themselves if they watch the presidential election from the sidelines. Even if a French establishment candidate earns enough votes to face Le Pen in a runoff, that candidate will also face an uphill battle to defeat her. The usual expectation that France’s voters will coalesce against Le Pen is no longer a reliable campaign strategy.

France’s incumbent president, the quintessential liberal technocrat, Emmanuel Macron, has been the strongest bulwark against the National Rally, defeating Le Pen in the runoffs in both 2017 and 2022. Term-limited, Macron cannot try for a trifecta. Even if he could, polling from 2023 showed that a decisive share of French voters regretted choosing Macron in 2022 and would have voted for Le Pen instead. This is not surprising.

When he assumed the presidency in 2017, Macron pledged a rejuvenation of France that would bridge the old political divides. Suffice it to say, he failed.

Macron targeted an unemployment rate of just five per cent by 2027. The rate now hovers closer to 10 per cent. Energy costs have spiked across Europe since 2022, and France is no exception. Growth remains stagnant. There is simply little sign of the opportunities Macron promised to restore.

Having absorbed much of the traditional French right and left into his centrist government over the past decade, Macron’s party has left very little political energy outside Le Pen’s national right and Mélenchon’s extreme leftism.

Indeed, keeping nationalists out of government has been a unifying objective of the European Union’s political establishment. Elections in the bloc have frequently ended with unpopular legacy conservatives , social democrats, liberals and Greens forming disparate coalitions to keep the nationalists at bay.

The nationalists often win a large plurality but cannot find coalition partners to form a parliamentary majority. That might have been a good strategy if those unnatural anti-nationalist alliances could produce effective and transformative governments, but they haven’t. Those rickety governments cannot agree on how to reverse economic stagnation or on taxes, public spending or pensions. All they have in common is the desire to see politicians like Le Pen remain out of power.

The International Monetary Fund reported in April that European Union industrial energy prices were roughly double their pre-2022 levels. Unstable markets and weak productivity have only worsened the situation, especially for younger Europeans who are disproportionately drawn to the nationalists.

In France, for example, one in five young French people is unemployed, and French wage growth stands at less than two per cent annually, well below the European average of 3.4 per cent .

Furthermore, the rising support for Le Pen’s nationalists reflects more than mere frustration. Mass immigration and the resulting cultural changes are celebrated by Mélenchon but condemned by Le Pen and her allies. Every year, public opinion draws closer to the latter.

One of the more vexing realities for the European establishment is that voters simply like the policies of their rivals. A poll from last December found that 52 per cent of French respondents and 57 per cent of German respondents considered even legal immigration to be too high.

The same survey found that majorities across France, Germany and Italy thought most regular immigrants did not share their national values. Questions of character and cohesion are not going away, and the failure of governing coalitions to provide definitive answers is their Achilles’ heel.

These same voters make distinctions between different categories of immigrants, with legally employed doctors enjoying higher levels of acceptance than those who break the rules. Not only do Europeans want lower immigration levels, but they also want those who are admitted to be skilled and useful.

Reluctantly, Europe’s anti-nationalist parties have begun following the trend. Denmark’s progressive government, for example, has become hawkish on assimilation and migration and plans to expel rejected asylum seekers starting in 2027, and the rest of the bloc is starting to follow suit .

Macron’s minister of European affairs, Benjamin Haddad, has declared that French voters will reject “extremism,” and has called on moderates to rally together and defeat Le Pen once again next year.

What is not extreme about the current state of Europe?

Terror attacks have become so normalized that they barely provoke the same outpourings of grief and anger as they did in 2015. In July, a van driven by 21-year-old Abdul Ballout rammed into a Pride parade in Berlin, killing one person and injuring 29. In Canada, there would be state-mandated weeks of mourning, government inquiries, and public memorials. In Europe, it is a statistic.

Many more statistics of decline could be cited to explain the rise of the nationalists who have yet to govern in most EU member states, from terrorism and migration to basic economic factors.

Europeans are not insane, and can realize the futility of choosing the same option over and over without results. Their faith in the politics they were raised with is breaking with good reason.

Most importantly, people across France and Europe are fatigued by a hopelessness from which no bottle of wine or hand-rolled cigarette can distract them anymore.

If Marine Le Pen is elected, perhaps the French will have indeed rejected the extremism of their times.

National Post

The 25th anniversary of the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001 is rendering all the memorials, tributes, reminiscences, chat-show panel discussions and public ceremonies that you might expect.

At their best, Americans recall their unity and resolve in the face of what was an unprecedented attack from the skies, straight out of a science-fiction movie. Canadians will offer an accounting of themselves as plucky allies. The generosity of the people of Gander, Nfld., who opened their homes to thousands of stranded airline passengers, has just been awarded its own Heritage Minute from Historica Canada.

But as a world-historical event, September 11 is easily matched by the grotesque scenes from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, 20 years later. Tens of thousands of terrified Afghans had swarmed the airport in desperation and panic in the days leading up to Aug. 30, 2021. That was the day the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan. It was the day U.S. president Joe Biden squandered the $995-billion investment the U.S. Treasury had sunk into a multinational project to rebuild Afghanistan after decades of Russian occupation, famine, proxy-war barbarism and Taliban rule.

That project was well underway: A new generation of Afghans was just graduating from university, women’s rights were respected as well as anywhere in the Muslim world and a fledgling Afghan democracy was just beginning to claw its way out from under the older generation’s cronyism and corruption.

To be fair, Biden’s withdrawal was an American bipartisan consensus. From his earliest days as vice-president, in 2009, Biden was of the same mind as Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defence under George W. Bush: Like Rumsfeld, Biden sneered at the notion of what he called “nation-building” in Afghanistan.

The Bush-Biden cynicism gradually seeped into Barack Obama’s Oval Office, but it wasn’t fully rewarded until President Donald Trump’s first term. In February, 2020, Trump’s negotiators cemented a pact with the Taliban that forced Afghans to “reconcile” with Mullah Omar’s sadistic Pakistani-backed insurgent emirate.

Against its will, the Afghan government was required to integrate the Taliban into its administration. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was strongarmed into releasing thousands of Taliban commanders and fighters from prison, without regard to war crimes proceedings by the International Criminal Court.

The Doha arrangement s permitted the Taliban to intensify their attacks on Afghan forces, so long as U.S. troops, drawn down to 2,500 soldiers, were left unmolested. The pact also stipulated that the U.S. would ensure the removal of all NATO troops from the country.

As president, Biden was pleased to honour the agreement even though the Taliban had violated its terms, notably its assurance that it would no longer shelter terrorist organizations like al-Qaida. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan left billions of dollars worth of U.S. military hardware in Taliban hands, and it wasn’t until July 21, 2022 that the senior al-Qaida cleric and 9-11 coordinator Ayman al-Zawahiri was eliminated by a Hellfire missile as he stood on the balcony of his upscale apartment in downtown Kabul.

By then, however, the reassuring story that both American Democrats and Republicans preferred to tell themselves had settled in. Afghanistan was a hopeless backwater of Islamist losers. Afghanistan would never be Switzerland. The “forever wars” must cease. The jihadists’ days were over, and it was finally time for what President Barack Obama called “nation-building at home.”

In this self-exculpating loop, it became necessary to overlook what Afghans had to say about all this.

In the years after September 11, 2001, Afghans became the most closely studied people in Central Asia, and Afghan polling consistently showed overwhelming public support for democracy, for the rights of girls to go to school, the rights of women to work outside the home and run for political office. Afghans consistently showed up as the most optimistic people on earth. Despite its colossal failures and missteps, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in the country was broadly and consistently supported.

It’s similarly inconvenient to notice that after perhaps a trillion dollars spent on the “war on terror,” al-Qaida offshoots like the Islamic State went on to slaughter tens of thousands of Iraqis and Syrians, and even now, the Global Terrorism Index lists ISIS, the al-Qaida-linked Al Shabaab in Somalia, and the Tehrik-e-Taliban in Pakistan, along with Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin — an alliance that includes the Saharan al-Qaida subsidiary — as the four deadliest terrorist organizations on earth.

Al-Qaida’s franchises in Africa command up to 10,000 fighters and earn about $100 million annually in taxation, smuggling and expropriation, according to Yale University’s Graeme Wood, author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State. This is a state of affairs that confounds the notion that al-Qaida has been reduced to an irrelevant, incompetent rump, Wood points out. “It’s hard to accept that your enemy is an idiot and that somehow you are losing to him anyway.”

For Canadians, the legacy of 9/11 was this country’s dedication to the cause of a sovereign, democratic Afghan republic. The task the Canadian Forces took on was to join with 35 other NATO countries to open up enough space to make that happen. It became something of a Canadian habit, especially after being confronted by President Trump’s first-term belligerence, to take credit for having sent Canadian troops to America’s aid in pursuing al-Qaida in Afghanistan. But the Canadian Forces’ Operation Apollo lasted only until October, 2003, when Canada’s efforts shifted through Operation Athena, under ISAF, to build Afghan self-government and security.

More than 40,000 troops ended up mobilized in the largest Canadian deployment since the Korean War. A total of 158 Canadian military personnel were killed in Afghanistan, along with a diplomat, four aid workers, a government contractor, and a journalist. It was the Canadian Forces’ misfortune to be assigned to Kandahar, in the Pashtun heartland, where the Taliban had put down its deepest roots after Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence Agency first embedded the Talibs there in the early 1990s.

While the Taliban was quickly driven out of most of Afghanistan in the weeks and months following 9/11, what made the Taliban resurgence possible was the failure of an Iraq-distracted America to force the issue of Pakistan’s persistent aid and comfort to the Taliban in the form of safe havens and madrassas on the Pakistani side of the “Durand Line” border.

When the Taliban swept back into power and Afghanistan was plunged into chaos following Biden’s withdrawal, Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan congratulated the Taliban for having finally broken “the chains of slavery.” It mustn’t be cause for much satisfaction in Islamabad and Rawalpindi that the Taliban soon turned tables, using Afghanistan as a safe haven to launch terror attacks in Pakistan.

By last October, Pakistani and Taliban forces had squared off against one another along the 2,600-kilometre disputed border, in ground skirmishes and airstrikes. By February, Islamabad declared an “open war” with the Taliban, and bombed several Afghan cities, including Kabul. Hundreds have been killed in the disturbances, which may or not be winding down.

Among the close observers of the Trump administration’s 2020 capitulation to the Taliban and the Biden administration’s squalid retreat at Hamid Karzai International Airport the following year was Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. It turned out that American resolve was nothing like it had been advertised, and on February 24, 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine in a full-on war of conquest.

It turns out that “forever wars” will go on, but only if you decide to lose them.

National Post

• Colby Cosh: Canada’s secret meeting with the Chinese military
• Jeffrey Herf: ‘Nakba’ exhibit is a direct assault on historical truths

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s wife Diana said in an interview that her life has been “disrupted” by marrying him, but that her position gives her opportunities “that other people don’t have.”

“I meet people and have access to conversations and things that I wouldn’t necessarily if I didn’t have him,” Diana Fox Carney told a Wednesday episode of The Honest Talk, a Canadian podcast that interviews influential women.

Fox Carney’s professional resume has consisted of a series of positions in think tanks, consultancies and NGOs, most of them related to climate change.

In 2021, she became a senior adviser at Eurasia Group, a New York-based political risk consultancy. The Balsillie School of International Affairs still lists her as a fellow who advises companies on how to pursue a “more nature positive economy.”

Fox Carney, 60, described her professional career as being “significantly and repeatedly disrupted” not only by her four children, but by moves made in service of Carney’s career as a central banker and then an asset manager.

But Fox Carney said she was more amenable to the moves because they were in the service of public policy, rather than her husband being a “big executive in a business that I didn’t care about.”

“Because I value what he’s doing it makes it much easier for me to want to, you know, support him,” Fox Carney told hosts Jennifer Stewart and Catherine Clark. Clark is herself a member of a political family; she’s the daughter of 16th prime minister Joe Clark.

“I obviously picked a winning horse; it was worthwhile supporting him.”

Like most spouses of Canadian prime ministers, Fox Carney has largely avoided the public spotlight.

She has no social media presence, rarely grants interviews and has only made two public speeches since her husband entered politics at the beginning of 2025.

The first was the April 2025 Liberal convention that confirmed Carney as Liberal leader and thus prime minister.

The second, in September of that year, addressed the United Nations on the topic of Ukrainian children held in Russian captivity. The same issue has also been taken up publicly by Melania Trump, wife of U.S. President Donald Trump.

In 2013, when Mark Carney was governor of the Bank of England, his wife briefly became a target of the U.K. press when she reacted to a report about falling British real estate prices with a social media post reading “maybe I’ll be able to find a place to live in London after all.”

As pointed out by the Daily Mail , Fox Carney wrote this despite her husband receiving a Bank of England housing allowance equivalent to more than C$400,000 per year.

Fox Carney did not specifically mention the incident in her podcast interview but did say that she preferred the Canadian media to U.K. media, as the latter was “much meaner and much more kind of gotcha on personal stuff.”

Fox Carney was born and raised in the U.K., and speaks with a noticeable British accent. She met Carney at Oxford University, where he was studying for post-graduate degrees in economics, and she was studying for a master’s degree in agricultural science.

She said their first meeting in the early 1990s was not “love at first sight,” and that she doesn’t really remember the details of their initial encounter, which was among mutual friends at a pub.

Rather, they got to know each other better through regular encounters at the Oxford Ice Hockey Club, where they were both frequent players.

“We took our time, but once we did get together it was a strong commitment,” she said.

Fox Carney said that Carney made it clear of his intentions to return to Canada after graduation, in contrast to her own plans to work a series of foreign postings in the field of international development.

She described one such post in Zanzibar, where she was working for the U.K. government.

“I said something like ‘it’s amazing to be in this island in the middle of the Indian Ocean … and my husband looked at me and kind of (said) ‘eh, no,’” she said.

Fox Carney told interviewers that she was “broadly supportive” of her husband’s actions as prime minister but didn’t “want to cause problems” on the issues with which she disagrees.

“If there are things I don’t agree about … I’m not going to talk about those things publicly, right?” Fox Carney said.

The interview did not discuss any particular policy points, with Fox Carney saying only that her husband’s job intersects with several issues she cares about, such as “nature and the environment and how we take care of the resources that we have been so generously bestowed here.”

Because of her husband’s political position, Fox Carney said she had decided not to “double down” on her previous career, and to focus instead on “convening power” around issues she “believes to be important.”

“I am very aware that there are opportunities for me now that other people don’t have,” she said.

• Is the trade war driving American NHL stars out of Canada?
• Trump’s latest trade actions are not ‘an escalation,’ economist says

Remember when the death of Queen Elizabeth II was going to prompt, at the very least, a serious rethinking of how the country works? Finally we might (as some pundits hoped) “grow up,” “move out of our parents’ basement,” and install a resident head of state. One chosen or elected through one of a variety of deeply flawed methods: a vote of Parliament and the legislatures, a general election, some kind of “citizens’ assembly,” or by just letting the prime minister choose. And the worst option, letting members of the Order of Canada choose, which is an actual real-life idea ! Those are some of the options floating around out there in the ether, in roughly increasing order of terribleness.

“This is the moment to have an honest debate on dissolving the monarchy, severing ties with Great Britain and taking the last momentous step on our journey to maturity,” author and journalist Andrew Cohen wrote in the Globe and Mail upon the Queen’s death. “We spared Queen Elizabeth the conversation. We cannot spare ourselves.”

“The truth is the monarchy is totally irrelevant today, an utterly useless institution that’s nothing more than a non-stop soap opera — from Harry and Megan to Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein,” the inimitable Bob Hepburn wrote in the Toronto Star shortly before the coronation of King Charles III.

“Do (Canadians) want to continue to be ‘ruled’ from England or do they want their head of state to be a Canadian?” retired University of Ottawa poli-sci professor John E. Trent asked in the Ottawa Citizen . Trent is described as “former Secretary General of the International Political Science Association” and “Senior Fellow at the Centre on Governance, University of Ottawa.” Nevertheless, we are not “ruled from England.” That is bonkers.

There were plenty of very appropriate reality checks in the media too — maybe even a surprising number — about the constitutional ramifications of cracking open this rancid nut. The word “impossible” was even used, appropriately, on occasion. People aren’t interested; they don’t much care; if they can’t agree on what comes next — the rather key point that derailed Australia’s 1999 referendum on the monarchy — then it’s really a moot point.

Anyway, there was no grand rethink. There was no rethink at all. And there was no reason to expect there would be. Justin Trudeau never seemed remotely anti-monarchy when he was prime minister. He spoke quite eloquently about how much he valued his time speaking with the Queen. But perhaps, even in 2022 when the Queen passed away, Trudeau had enough of that progressive façade left to provide hope to the deluded.

There’s no such façade on Prime Minister Mark Carney, who famously invited King Charles to open Parliament in 2025, much to the chagrin of the anti-monarchists. (“The few monarchists left in this country might be applauding the decision to have King Charles III read the speech … but others of us think the new prime minister would have been better advised to have had Mike Myers in a hockey jersey take on that role,” pollster Allan Gregg argued . I assume it was partly in jest, but why joke about that?)

Heck, in response to President Donald Trump’s talk of making us the 51st state, Carney is out there these days singing Sir John A. Macdonald’s praises. And under his watch, the Bank of Canada just released a rather handsome new $20 bill featuring Charles on one side and the Vimy Memorial on the other. That couldn’t really be a more explicit statement without writing it out in so many words: Canada’s history will always British, and it will always be French, and it will live forever in the soil of European battlefields.

Roughly 4,000 Indigenous Canadians voluntarily enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force to fight for the British Empire during the First World War, incidentally. That was roughly one-third of the adult male Indigenous population in the mid-1910s.

This is the sort of bedrock stability that many Canadians understandably yearn for in Trump’s Wonderland. It’s what leads some of us to indulge the fantasy of European Union membership as our alliance with America deteriorates. But even if it were possible, EU membership would involve surrendering sovereignty. Canadians aren’t big on that these days. Having King Charles III as our head of state involves no surrender of anything, because it has always been thus. We don’t have to put him on money. We don’t have to invite him to give the throne speech. We choose to do those things.

I had my doubts about Charles. I have few now. He has successfully rebranded from “wooden, occasionally crusty and a bit odd” to “wooden, occasionally crusty and strangely avuncular.” And it doesn’t seem like a put-on. Meanwhile he has dealt with Andrew, Harry and Meghan in suitably brutal fashion — brutal by Royal Family standards, that is. Charles clearly takes this job very seriously, and so does William, who will succeed him. Indeed, they take it much more seriously than many Canadians who think they want to get rid of them.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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• Chris Selley: Quebec cannot afford this anti-anglo decadence

Last week, the federal government announced that it’s extending the gas tax holiday into 2027, which is yet another policy that Prime Minister Mark Carney has borrowed from the Conservative handbook. And it isn’t an isolated case, given that Carney zeroed the consumer carbon tax, cancelled the electric vehicle mandate and is working to expand oil and gas capacity.

The rightward shift of the Liberals is appreciated, especially after the malaise of the Trudeau years, but this shift has boxed in Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who built his brand on being a tax-cutting, mandate-scrapping alternative to the Liberals, only to watch a Liberal prime minister take his bread and butter off the table.

In the consistent chaos created by U.S. President Donald Trump, the Conservatives’ prospects are looking pretty bleak. The party is lagging in the polls and struggling with the Liberal sweep of the last three byelections. With upwards of six more byelections on the horizon, the Conservatives need a wedge issue that represents a genuine dividing line that Carney’s centrist instincts won’t let him touch. Poilievre has that wedge issue sitting in plain sight: supply management.

For more than 50 years , Canada’s dairy, egg and poultry sectors have operated behind a wall of production quotas and prohibitive tariffs, insulated from the market competition that every other Canadian farmer faces. As a result, the industry has become one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country and no major party has been willing to touch it. That unwillingness is exactly why it could act as the perfect wedge issue for Poilievre’s Conservative party.

The first justification for the end of supply management is meaningfully addressing the cost-of-living crisis and the rising prices Canadians are seeing at the grocery store. Research from the Montreal Economic Institute has shown that supply management has Canadians paying between 37 and 55 per cent more for eggs, chicken and milk. This is by design, built by a cartel with government backing, and the result is that more than 100,000 Canadians are pushed under the poverty line due to higher prices.

Poilievre has repeatedly talked about how there are a record number of Canadians lining up at food banks, but how can one point out that very real problem without addressing a program that intentionally inflates prices? Breaking the quota system would open Canada to competition, and is one of the few grocery price fixes that could be implemented in a single budget.

Supporters of supply management will argue that ending the program would spell the end of the domestic egg, poultry and dairy industries as we know them. That is a concern worth considering, but one that history has shown doesn’t hold much weight. When New Zealand ended its quota system and subsidies, farmers predicted ruin. What actually happened, for dairy specifically, is that New Zealand built one of the most competitive industries on the planet.

By 2016 , the small island nation at the bottom of the Pacific was exporting more butter around the world than the entire European Union, was the world’s largest exporters of milk powders and the second-largest exporter of cheese. Our supply managed farmers are shut out of that type of growth because supply management permanently caps them at the size of the domestic market.

The doom and gloom case also doesn’t hold up when you look across the entirety of Canada’s agricultural sector. We don’t have supply management for beef, pork, fruit or vegetables, and yet those industries haven’t been swallowed whole by international competition.

This is where farm fairness comes into play, because the rest of Canadian farmers get no quota, no guaranteed price and no tariff wall. They compete, innovate, provide for the domestic market and export internationally. Treating every Canadian farmer the same, giving them the freedom to serve the domestic market and sell abroad, is a simple fairness that the current system denies. It is also a simple fairness that is right on brand for Pierre Poilievre.

Lastly, and most importantly, supply management needs to be phased out regardless of whether the Canada-U.S. trade relationship survives Trump’s chaos. It’s been a grievance of U.S. administrations for both Republicans and Democrats.

Former U.S. president Barack Obama was pressured to kick Canada out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks over supply management, and the U.S. trade representative at the time directly called out Canada’s protectionism. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. initiated the trade dispute mechanism in CUSMA, again challenging our protectionism.

Supply management is in the crosshairs now because of Trump, but his objections to it are bipartisan, meaning whatever trade relationship we have with the U.S. moving forward, and whoever is president, it will continue to be a thorn in our side.

But this isn’t just about the Americans, because our other trade partners have rightly complained about supply management, as well. The United Kingdom has long sought more access to the Canadian market, while the trade deal with Europe was delayed for years because of it. New Zealand went so far as to file a formal dispute under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership against aspects of supply management, and won.

Ending supply management would remove the single biggest recurring irritant in Canada’s efforts to build trade relationships that don’t run through Washington, D.C. If Poilievre and the Conservatives want to inject life back into their party, they need to go where the prime minister cannot. Announcing that the Conservatives would end supply management to ease prices at the grocery store, treat all farmers the same and allow them to export their goods, while removing the biggest barrier to signing new trade agreements, is exactly that.

National Post

David Clement is policy director at the Consumer Choice Center.

• Sylvain Charlebois: A plan to slowly wean Canada off supply management
• John Ivison: Supply management set to spoil another huge trade opportunity

Some of you will have noticed a new and slightly shocking example of Canada’s longstanding case of information constipation: namely, the occurrence of Fifth China-Canada Defence Coordination Dialogue, which took place in Ottawa on Friday of last week. If you are hearing about this for the first time, you may have all kinds of questions. Such as “Canada is coordinating its national defence with China’s?” Or “Why are we doing that?” Or “What would this involve exactly?” Or “This is the fifth time?”

And perhaps the biggest question of all: why hasn’t Canada officially announced that this happened? Because the People’s Republic of China, for its part, managed to put out a press release the day after the conference took place. Apparently representatives of the two countries “had a candid and in-depth exchange of views on international and regional issues of mutual interest, expressed willingness to strengthen practical exchanges and cooperation between the two militaries, and enhanced mutual understanding and trust.”

To be sure, this paragraph of verbiage tells the Chinese and Canadian publics nothing, but at least the Chinese Ministry of National Defence went to the trouble. One notices how much a literally communist press circular resembles the press releases our own government authorities and corporations routinely emit, when they get around to it …

There has been no corresponding public explanation of the talks from the Canadian side, but the Globe and Mail’s star Steve Chase and Canadian Press’s Dylan Robertson , chasing down the Chinese clue, were fed a statement by a spokesman for our defence department. The spokesman was able to confirm that the meeting took place, and that it happened in Ottawa. “As part of ongoing working-level dialogue,” the statement read, “Canadian and Chinese defence officials met on September 4, in support of ongoing military-to-military communications at the functional level.”

Which doesn’t add much to what the Chinese said (proactively, without having to be hassled by reporters). It added that “As a matter of longstanding practice, the Government of Canada does not publicize working-level meetings by officials.” Chase was able to find a background source who told him that about 10 Canadian officers and diplomats were present.

It is certainly the longstanding practice of Canadian officials to sit on information until it dies of buttock suffocation, but I wonder if this is justifiable or healthy. Actually, scratch that: I don’t wonder. It’s not. No doubt some people will be tempted to make trouble with the Americans about a low-level side chat between the Canadian and Chinese militaries, but look at how the U.S. military handles this stuff. The senior American military commander in the Pacific, Adm. Samuel Paparo, met personally with his People’s Liberation Army counterpart on Canadian soil the day before the China-Canada talks.

We know this because U.S. Pacific Command put out a public press release about the meeting . And this American statement, unlike Canada’s privately circulated one, actually explains the purpose of the meeting in plain English words. “The two leaders [Paparo and PLA Gen. Yang Zhibin] discussed the importance of maintaining open lines of communication between senior U.S. and Chinese military leaders to reduce the risk of miscalculation and promote safe and professional conduct between forces.”

A sensible American citizen will read those words and think “Well, sure, that makes sense. Perhaps we’re adversaries of China, and they have territorial interests that overlap with ours and those of our key regional allies, but we’ve got to be able to talk to one another and maybe establish basic ground rules in order to prevent unintended conflict and escalatory incidents.” Probably the same kind of thing is true about the China-Canada conference, but why didn’t somebody say so before Canadian were reading about the talks in the South Korean press ?

Isn’t it more important for Canada to be forthright about this stuff, given that Canada-haters in the U.S. are bound to squawk about it? We have left those people largely free to say whatever crazy nonsense they like without contradiction, haven’t we? And God forbid I mention it, but our Liberal governments have an intermittent 60-year history of smooching up to communist China, and such a government arguably has a special duty to account for a “Defence Coordination Dialogue.”

National Post

The “ Palestine Uprooted : Nakba Past and Present” exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights” (CMHR) brings the propaganda of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of the 1970s into an institution that receives substantial funding from federal, provincial and municipal governments.

The Network of Engaged Canadian Academics invited me to Winnipeg to view the exhibit, drawing on my expertise as a historian who, in works including “ Israel’s Moment ” and “ Three Faces of Antisemitism ,” has studied the establishment of the State of Israel, the impact of Nazism and communism on antagonism towards Zionism and Israel both before and after 1948, along with hostility toward the Jewish state in both secular leftist and Islamist circles.

“Palestine Uprooted” repeats a version of events articulated by the PLO member and writer Mahmoud Darwish in a speech he wrote that was delivered by PLO chair Yasser Arafat to the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. According to Darwish and Arafat, Palestinian innocence and Israeli perfidy justified decades of PLO terrorism and rejection of compromise.

The current exhibit repeats the same version of events they offered 52 years ago. The only new element is that what originated as part of a propaganda campaign to delegitimate the State of Israel and justify the use terror to destroy it is now receiving credibility and legitimacy from a government-affiliated museum in Canada.

The exhibit claims that, “Around 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced during the creation of the State of Israel.” This is not true. Historians such as Efraim Karsh in his book “ Palestine Betrayed ” and Yoav Gelber in “ Palestine 1948 : War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Problem” have demonstrated that many thousands left their homes, some at the urging of Arab leaders, in expectation that the Arab states would soon invade and destroy the new Jewish state.

As the historian Benny Morris documented in “ 1948 : The First Arab-Israeli War,” thousands of others became refugees as a result of battles in particular towns and villages — battles that Israel had to fight and win to ensure its survival.

The exhibit fails to inform viewers that in November 1947, Canada joined a two-thirds majority at the UN supporting a resolution that called for the establishment of two states — one Jewish, and one Arab — in parts of the former British Mandate for Palestine.

The Palestinian Arabs, represented at the UN by the Arab Higher Committee, rejected the partition plan, insisting that there should be no Jewish state in the territory whatsoever. The Jewish community in Mandate Palestine, represented at the UN by the Jewish Agency, accepted what became known as “the two-state solution.”

The votes in favour of the resolution came from the Soviet Union, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the democracies of Western Europe, the United States and Canada, among others. On Dec. 2, 1947, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, leader of the Arab Higher Committee, responded to the UN resolution by calling for a general strike to reject it, and in the following months, the committee launched a civil war against the Jewish community to prevent its implementation.

The exhibit says nothing about Husseini’s then-famous Islamist Jew-hatred, a hatred that stimulated his enthusiastic wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany, and led to his opposition to the Zionist project. The exhibit also fails to mention that on May 15, 1948, in a joint act of aggression, five Arab states — Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria — then escalated that war by ordering their armies to destroy the newly formed Jewish state.

In keeping with its propagandistic essence, the exhibit erases any agency or responsibility on the part of Palestinian Arab leaders or Arab states for beginning and escalating a war to prevent the creation of — and, upon failing that, destroy — the State of Israel.

It was the Arab rejection of the UN resolution, not the Zionist defence of the compromise, that was unjust, unwise and, yes, racist, as well. At its core, it was a rejection of the values of diversity and tolerance that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights claims to support. Had the Arab Higher Committee accepted the compromise offered by the UN in 1947, there would have been no war of 1948, and no Arabs or Jews would have been uprooted.

The ability of Palestinian propagandists to capture and misuse the credibility of a government-affiliated institution in Winnipeg will not only fan the flames of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in Canada. By ignoring well-known works of historical scholarship, it also constitutes an attack on the discipline of history and the effort of historians to present a truthful and complete account of the past.

Historians in Canada should defend our profession against the CMHR’s dismissal of our valid, but for some inconvenient, findings. Government officials should ensure that the credibility that comes from government funding is not extended to the kinds of distortions of the past that are evident in this exhibit.

National Post

Jeffrey Herf is professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and author of “Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949.”

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